Rigging Quickly and Precisely With Naming And The Armature Modifier Getting your naming right can save you a lot of stress and time, and rigging is no different. In this quick tip article, we’ll take a look at how you can be really lazy and use a technique called automatic weighting. This is usually not ideal (as it lacks control for anything but the simplest models), so we’ll take a closer look at how we can use the armature modifier to our advantage. Automatic Weight OK, so I say it is lazy but it might actually save you a load of time and be good enough during prototyping – just don’t expect it to work well with more complex models! You will require two things: A model and an armature. Save your work so you can start over if this doesn’t work out Make sure you are in Object mode Select all the mesh objects you want controlled by you armature Select the armature last, making it the active object. -notice how all the mesh has a darker orange outline, whilst the armature has a lighter orange. That indicates it is the active mesh object. Either use the Object menu, […]

How do AAA games make their worlds feel alive and interesting, even if all the player is doing is walking down the street? They consider their worlds as living entities, not just static backdrops. One way they do this is by using movement within their game world to tell a story. Let’s look at a simple, specific example… Here is a game scene from our RPG that we’ve been developing. The player is progressing along their path, heading towards the next steps of the quest we’ve created for them. In our game, like most RPGs, we’re using combat as a primary system of challenge and interest… but of course we don’t want to have one, long, continuous combat sequence. In this instance, what are our options for communicating story to the player? Well, we can have the player bump into an NPC and deliver some dialogue. That is usually the most to-the-point way of getting story across. For example: Crazy Bill: Quick, the town is under attack, the villagers need help. Player: Rightio Bill, I’ll get right on that. Or we can pop up a dialogue box on the screen saying something to the effect of: “The town is […]

How frustrating Unity isn’t starting and telling you “Sorry, this link is no longer valid”? Not a helpful error either! This confused me the other day as Unity had been working flawlessly previously. To make matters worse restarting the computer appeared to fix it, but just once and then it started again. So what is going on here? Well I had just installed Unity 2018 beta, and thought, oh well is must be a beta issue, but then Unity 2017 started doing it as well. The only thing that had changed as far as I was aware is that I wasn’t at home, and link no longer valid didn’t make much sense yet alluded to a issue with the internet. A quick peek at my firewall settings revealed that the Unity program is blocked when on a public network But I’m not on a public network, ah Windows! So to sort this out we are going to have to change the network type. There is more than one way to do this, but here’s how I went about it. Click on the start button and click the settings button Next Select Network and Internet After that you’ll need to select […]

In this interview, Ian Garstang (Gaming Debugged) talks to Ben about his journey from fireman to best-selling Udemy instructor. Along with his love of gaming, the best ways for first-time game designers to take their first tentative steps into the world of game development and finally find out which engine Ben prefers 😉 Join more than 300,000 students taking courses by Ben and the GameDev.tv team over on Udemy.

A place for everything, everything in its place. Benjamin Franklin That’s why we care about this technique, because otherwise without it we duplicate things in Unity – a lot. Then… We lose track of our project. Bugs appear everywhere. Builds swell to device-breaking sizes. We go a little crazy. … and then die! OK, I may be exaggerating just a little here, but in my experience creating some of the world’s biggest and best online courses on Unity I get to see what my 100s of thousands of students do right – and wrong. The Premise NOT premises, like a building. And when a cloud provider offers you an “on-premise” solution then they’re dumb, they mean “on premises”. Man, who can use a dictionary these days! Anyway, I digress. When you sit at a computer typing, or using your mouse, think about how much value it’s even possible to create. If you type continually at am ambitious 80 words per minute, then you’re only creating about half a kilobyte per minute! You may create real value a little faster with the mouse, but I doubt it! So if you’re not recording video or audio, your project file shouldn’t be growing faster […]

Why do we sometimes procrastinate? You know, those times that we avoid getting things done. Why is it that at times we just cant ignore our distractions? The short-term excitement becomes more powerful than our long-term goals. In fact, why don’t we just go ahead and answer this question right now by seeing if there are any new episodes on Netflix… Oh, wait a minute, I didn’t mean to say that out loud. Ignore that last bit. Must.. stay… focused. Quick, we need a heading with some bold font… The Three Reasons That You Procrastinate Avoiding your work comes down to one (or all) of these three things: You don’t know WHAT to do. That is, you aren’t clear on your next task, you don’t have a To Do list, you haven’t mapped out your priorities. You don’t know HOW to do it. Some tasks are tough and you aren’t sure the best way to approach it, perhaps you’ve never done it before, perhaps you’ve done it previously but it hasn’t been very successful. You don’t WANT to do it. There’s nothing worst than sitting down to start work on something you hate, or something you “should” be doing but […]

Want to be a better game designer? Want to create more interesting games? If so, then lets discuss the Single-Attribute-Exploration-And-Expansion Technique… or, worded slightly less crappily, “Edgecraft” (as coined by marketing guru Seth Godin). What is Edgecraft? Edgecraft is the process identifying one attribute or quality of a thing (eg. your game) and exaggerating that quality until it is something new / fresh / amazing / WTF-ish. The idea is to push beyond “sensible” and find something that really stands out. Let’s apply that to your game. First, lets consider Exhibit A, a screenshot from the Unity RPG Course that Ben Tristem and I have been working on. The game has the core building blocks of most RPGs – a Player Character that you control, enemies, combat, User Interface, hit points, storyline, and so on. The magic of using Edgecraft is to take each aspect, one at a time, and ask yourself, “how could I make this different, or unusual, or crazy?”. You can do this systematically by picking one aspect, then brainstorming on that topic. For example, consider Exhibit B… Arrow #1 is pointing at the player. Let’s dig into the player a bit. Step 1 – Brainstorming attributes […]

Looking to get a game character from A to B? Want it to work-out its own route around obstacles? This is called pathfinding, and everyone keep harping on about A* (said A star). This is an awesome technique, but it can also suck for beginners! Why? Because it’s much more complex and, in many simple cases, unnecessary. The table below shows how it stacks up against other pathfinding algorithms… As you can see, A* doesn’t win on all counts. Do you need movement cost – the ability to have areas where the character moves faster or slower like roads or swamps? Do you need blistering speed, or would 50% slower than A* be just fine? If the answer to these questions is no, and you’re just starting-out, why would you put yourself through the pain of learning A*? Apart from the added complexity of understanding and programming A*, there are some other ways in which it sucks. If you want to find a path from a start point to multiple possible end points, or from multiple start points to one end point (thing Defence Grid 2 or other RealTime Strategies), then A* sucks as it’s designed for point-to-point pathfinding. The […]

Those of you keen enough to notice may have seen the disappearance of the VR course from our Udemy portfolio. I’m sorry I didn’t write this post earlier to explain why. As long time students will know, we are constantly working to improve the quality of our teaching. While this is great because new courses keep getting better, it also means we have old courses that are not as good. VR was becoming one of these courses. So a few months back we made the decision to start retiring the course from the marketplace. We no longer feel this course offers students the best teaching and the fast evolving pace of the VR landscape has made much of its content outdated. Obviously we would love to spend the required time to update the course and completely rework its learning journey. However, we currently have other important projects we need to focus on such as the Complete Unity Developer 2.0 and the RPG course. I apologise for those of you who might have been planning to purchase the course in the near future. I hope you will understand our reasons and hold out for the time we revisit the subject.

In the Unity RPG Core Combat Creator course lecture, “Start Designing Your RPG”, our instructor Rick Davidson teaches us how to fill out a Game Design Document and shows us examples of different types of game designs! In this blog I’m taking my inspiration from Rick’s lecture and my experiences with playing video games, and I’m going to share some thought provoking discussions about the game design process. A lot of this is based on my opinions, and there are so many game design techniques that I can’t cover them all in this. Study game design and learn all that you can, and please refer to Ben and Rick’s course, the Unity RPG Core Combat Creator, for more information about designing and programming an RPG (Role Playing Game). Ben Tristem and Rick Davidson are awesome instructors! Instead of thinking about a Game Design Document as something that you have to fill out quickly, so that you can get something done, please think of it like this: Think of it as a manual or a map, which will help you focus on certain tasks and, in turn, help you develop your game. This framework and your experiences will help you decide […]